


Shoot Me to the Ground

by Rainfallen



Series: To the Teeth [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Gen, M/M, Technology, The Night's Watch
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-10
Updated: 2014-08-10
Packaged: 2018-02-09 15:34:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1988277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rainfallen/pseuds/Rainfallen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Future Technological Westeros!AU.  Grenn POV.  Jon Snow's little sister has released a video implicating the Queen Regent in King Robert's death, and the country is in chaos.  At the Wall, an underfunded and understaffed dumping ground for tech criminals, burgeoning urban hackers, and industry has-beens, our intrepid Brothers of the Night's Watch are trying to fend off the suddenly heightened cyber and traditional warfare activity hitting the Westerosi networks from north of the Wall in the wake of the political chaos to the south.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saboten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saboten/gifts).



> Title from [Angus and Julia Stone](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj905HtsB-g). My thanks/apologies to Han Solo and maybe _Independence Day_ just a little bit. Written in the tenth round of the [got-exchange](http://got-exchange.livejournal.com) for my darling [Daria](http://sabotensan.tumblr.com), who asked for modern!AU + anything with Grenn x Pyp and got... this.

Castle Black was in chaos, and it was all the gods-damned little sister's fault.

Grenn would never tell Jon that to his face, not if he wanted his own to stay intact, but she'd been on the run for _three years_ , and at any other point during those years he'd have been more than happy to see her drop this figurative bombshell on the royalist bastards in the south. But no, she had to pick _this week_ , of all weeks—when he already had more than plenty to keep his hands busy (and then some) with new frenzied activity on the other side of the Wall and Ygritte and her whole team gone missing with six of his rangers besides—to release that gods-damned vid capture of the gods-damned Queen and council and send everything straight to hell. He had extractions to run, missions to plan, recruits to train, larders to raid!

It had been almost a week since the news reached them, some 12 hours after it happened. They were always the last to know. And it wasn't a normal comm or some network message or even a gods-damned raven, oh no. The knowledge that some shit somewhere in the country had gone straight to the seven hells came in the form of a massive energy and data influx on their systems matched by a physical push at the Wall that almost brought the men of the Watch staggering to their collective knees. Grenn nearly lost half a ranging team in the storm that hit, three of them still in the infirmary, knocked senseless in the electricity and magnetic signals and ice that whirled in a hellish vortex that was anything but natural. None of it should have even been possible, but the Night's King had never let little nuisances like the laws of nature stop him before, and this mess had his frozen fingerprints all over it.

It was only after they'd pushed back the first offense and stabilized the defenses temporarily that the news had trickled in through the over-loaded standard channels and straining comm systems. The youngest missing daughter of Winterfell, Arya Stark, had managed to bypass the system securities set in place, not only those of the Watch but also those of the Gold Cloaks—a sect of the royal city guard tasked with supplementing the network security of the capitol city in case the Watch missed any nasties on their way down the line. Then she had overloaded the comm system with a three-year-old vid capture implicating the Queen Regent in the death of her late husband, King Robert I, blessed be his boozy name. Grenn hadn't seen the vid capture, didn't particularly care to, but whatever was on it had spun King's Landing into total madness. Word was the young king was dead, the Queen Regent was locked away, the Faith was taking up arms, and every man and mouse were scrambling to find a foothold of power in the teeming mess of the capitol.

Grenn wasn't going to mourn too deeply for that shit arse of a boy king, but some warning would have been lovely. The timing had been utter shit either way you hung it. They were already grossly undermanned, even more so than usual with the patrols lost north of the Wall where they'd been ranging with Ygritte, and they had been completely unprepared for the backlash that came in the wake of Arya's little stunt. Grenn didn't know for sure if the daily assaults were only the forces of the Night's King—they could have been aided by some fringe group of Free Folk left over from after Jon's unification movement or might even originate with some powerful Essosi enemy of Westeros, sensing weakness as the political structure in King's Landing collapsed in on itself, but his money was on the thrice-damned Others. Regardless of the origins, he'd seen nothing like it in his seven years at the Wall, and his senior brothers said much the same. They were in no position to hold off an attack of this magnitude, but here they were, and hold it they must.

_Some people's sisters are just so gods damned inconsiderate,_ Grenn thought uncharitably as he hurried through the narrow cold corridor that ran down through the heart of old Castle Black, already late for his daily check-in with said unfortunately-sistered Lord Commander Snow. Grenn dodged Satin in the hallway, Satin who scurried on toward the Builder's hall with an armload of blinking cables and a gaggle of the youngest Steward-bound recruits trailing after him like so many goslings. The recruits were all similarly laden with supplies no doubt meant to help counter the power overload that had the low-hanging lights in the corridor blinking intermittently and was likely making the defenses for the rest of the country patchy at best. _Nothing like an international crisis to bring the Orders together,_ Grenn thought in a burst of renewed dourness better suited to Edd.

Grenn shouldered through the doorway of the cavernous underground control room where the tech engineers, both Builders and Stewards, kept up the central mainframes; it was the hub of their power and the center of the defenses for the national comm systems. Since the attacks had begun, Jon had spent most of his time here when he wasn't atop the Wall, overseeing Sam's efforts to trace and jam the signals hitting them.

Grenn breathed a sigh of relief at the relative warmth of the air, heated by the perpetually-humming consoles, and promptly stumbled, cursing, over a steel box full of bulky and painfully-outdated console facings and tech bits and gods only knew what else. "What is this bollocks?" he demanded loudly, and shoved the box hard against the wall with a sore foot.

"Kick'em harder, that'll make'em work!" Pyp called from a far corner, his hair wildly askew and his headset hanging on his head at a precarious angle from the last time he'd taped it back together. He cocked a finger pistol at Grenn and clucked in mock approval.

Grenn didn't even pretend to understand why Pyp was always here. Technically speaking, he should have been under Grenn's command, as he'd been assigned to the Rangers after his training completed, even served in the order alongside Grenn for a year or two before their numbers thinned and Grenn took up the post of First Ranger vacated by Jon's missing uncle. Three years back, after the fourth time Grenn had fished Pyp out of the sea of tangled network lines and inoperable ancient tech he'd been intent on fixing up and setting aright, Grenn gave him up for lost and smacked an 'on semi-permanent reassignment to First Steward Tarly in control room' note in Pyp's file. Sam didn't mind the extra help, especially now, and Pyp had always been too smart for his own good with his clever ideas and clever fingers and clever quips from his clever little—

Grenn had been silent too long. "Maybe if your stewards did their stewarding better," Grenn hollered back at him with a vaguely threatening gesture.

"'Stewarding?' Is that even a word?" Pyp asked, but Grenn made himself stop listening and stomped over to the primary control panel where Jon was huddled.

"Any news? Let's have it," Grenn said, nudging Jon aside with an elbow to his shoulder.

"See for yourself," Jon told him, not looking up from his panel but pointing absently to the display to his right.

Grenn grumbled under his breath; there was a reason he was a ranger and not a steward or a builder. He was the muscle, a fighter, a strategist in a pinch, but certainly not a technician. Still, he followed Jon's finger to the point on the network map that was pulsing red concentric circles ominously, then poked at the display until the captions and preliminary report blinked onto the VDU.

**MASSIVE EVENT,** the headline read, scrolling by almost as swiftly as Grenn was able to read the words. **WESTEROS DEFENSES COMPROMISED IN MIDST OF MURDER ALLEGATIONS AGAINST QUEEN REGENT. CHAOS REIGNS AT THE WALL AS WILDLING HACKERS EXPLOIT NETWORK.** Grenn made a noise caught somewhere between disbelief and derision.

"That's old news," he said dismissively. "And a damned lie, that last bit. You know that they're—"

"Ah, no. Here, look at the update," Jon said, reaching across Grenn's arm and tapping the display.

**OVERNIGHT INCREASE IN NETWORK WALL ATTACKS,** this one read. **UNPRECEDENTED SCALE AND UNIDENTIFIED METHODS USED IN RELENTLESS WILDLING ATTACKS TO WEAKEN NIGHT'S WATCH DEFENSES AND SPLINTER NETWORK STREAMS. MODE OF ATTACKS YET TO BE DETERMINED; SMALL COUNCIL ORDERS INQUIRY IN LIGHT OF CONTINUED DEGRADATION OF SECURITY SYSTEM.**

Grenn shook his shaggy head in disgust. "Where are they even getting this shite about the Free Folk? Maybe some of the stragglers still want us all dead, sure, but this makes it sound like we're all still at each other's throats, not friends now." He heaved a sigh. "So, lies on the network and nothing new about where all this is coming from."

"That about sums it up," Jon said. "Nothing new from your scouts, no word of... anyone?"

"Nothing new," Grenn confirmed, and then nodded a greeting to Sam, who approached and passed a slim datapad to Jon.

"Commander, I need you to—" Sam began, but Jon held up a hand.

"A moment. " Jon set the datapad down beside the console. "You both should hear this. I sent some samples of the data packs hitting us down to Dragonstone—which you know already, Sam—but I've just heard back, and it's nothing they have ever seen before either. Did you see the headlines, Sam? Good, then you already know. I should have set the Reinwalt encoding better when I sent the data bundles, but I was too impatient. There was a leak along the way. That's where the network feeds are getting their headlines, I'd wager—somewhere along the line between here and there, there's a weak spot they've exploited."

"So they're only getting part of the picture and they're twisting it even more on the public broadcasts?" Grenn asked, trying to keep up.

Jon nodded. "Exactly. And this leads to more panic because the people begin to think the situation here is even worse than it actually is. They likely fear the Free Folk have turned against us entirely, thanks to this."

"Well, it _is_ quite bad," Sam put in. "If not as bad as all that. But Jon, you really should—"

"It certainly isn't _good_ , but it's been exaggerated by the network hawkers, trying to use their same old scare tactics to bring everyone back in line. They're in the Crown's employ, never doubt it," Jon said. "But Grenn. If we don't know and Dragonstone doesn't know, then we've precious few options for now on the tech end aside from shoring up defenses as best we can. The hardline defenses may fall to you and Othell soon enough. We will hold the Wall, of course, but under this kind of assault we'll have to be creative."

Sam sighed and shifted his weight from one foot to another anxiously.

"But what are they _doing_?" Grenn asked. "Whoever _they_ are. I'm no tech engineer, but even I can see this isn't standard data floods or replications, this is—"

Jon shook his head. "No. It's like nothing we've ever seen before. With all the network noise, it took Pyp and Sam three days to even pinpoint where the attacks are hitting and in what order—"

"Ho! We're working very hard!" Pyp yelled indignantly from his corner, obviously only half-listening.

"—and although they're _working very hard_ , they still can't tell anything specific about where they're coming from. Until we have a point of origin, all we can do is shore up defenses, in here and on the ground. But here, have a look at what they've found."

Jon reset Grenn's display to show the length and breadth of the physical Wall and all the digital divisions of its protective barrier that branched off toward the cities and populated areas to the south. Its field was an intricate and mystical melding of natural elements, networking lines, and magic—if one was to believe the tales, and Grenn had seen plenty enough to make him believe most anything—that served the dual purposes of keeping the peoples of Westeros largely shielded from the malevolent energies of the far North and keeping their network safe from hijacking. If the network defenses fell or were overtaken, that could easily allow anything from the crashing of economic markets to the masking of a full-scale ground invasion until it was far too late.

The Wall was as dizzying and breathtaking here, viewed in digital form in the very belly of its upkeep facility, as it was outside in the all-too dangerous open air of the North, with near-constant snow storms and residual fallout from that cursed ice dragon still making physical upkeep and scouting of the area highly hazardous. That was the work Grenn lived for, though, and everyone knew that without the physical structure of the Wall to house the mainframes and, more importantly, to direct the branching signals southward, everything would fall.

The image Jon displayed was grim. The shifting lines on the display showed the full physical length of the Wall and the much larger barriers and lines which interlinked and crisscrossed one another in a delicate pattern that looked like nothing so much as a spread of lace or netting, pushing ever southward to shield the rest of the folks of Westeros from the cold magic and warped tech of the distant North, where men and machines and demons merged into one force—often one body—under the auspices of the Night's King, who remained hell-bent on claiming all of the continent for his own. But the shielding along and above the wall and the digital defenses within it showed precisely and strangely mirrored points of assault. The lines were bent and thin under high external pressure and floods of energy. There were several points of obvious pressure visible on the display: here at Castle Black in the center of the Wall, of course, but in four other narrow regions as well, at seemingly random points along the Wall. As they watched, the lines converging at Castle Black dipped on the screen before them, and the lights in the control room dimmed ever so slightly again.

"What can I do?" Grenn asked. "Should I go lend a hand to Othell? Get another physical barrier up?"

"First, I think," Sam said, "Jon, I think you ought to check this incoming. Something, someone's flagging you, and I think it might be important."

"Right." Jon picked up and tapped at the datapad, frowned at it, and tapped some more. "Did you look at it?" Sam shook his head. "There's a message, yes, but there's something else here, some marker in the private channels I've never seen before."

"I can—" Sam began, but Pyp appeared behind Grenn's shoulder, drawn out from his corner by the telltale beep of an encoded message.

"I'll take that!" he said, worming his way between Grenn and Jon. His deft fingers peeked out like pale promises from his thin leather fingerless gloves, and Grenn watched as they tapped and pinched at the display screen of the datapad. Pyp murmured something soft and cajoling at the interface, and Grenn scowled at it.

"Oh ho," Pyp said after another moment of quick tapping. "There. Easy as pie. I bodged it a bit, and there's more to it than that, but here's what's on the surface. Have a look, _Lord Commander_." Jon's title on Pyp's lips always sounded like a jape halfway on its way to an insult, but Jon never seemed to mind. He'd told Grenn once that becoming Lord Commander had seemed like a great cosmic joke to himself on more than one occasion, too.

"What's it?" Grenn asked, still frowning at the message suspiciously.

Jon's eyes skimmed over the contents quickly. "It's from the Bull, down in the Riverlands."

Grenn's shoulders tensed immediately. "What's that tosser done now?" he ground out.

Pyp pulled a face at Grenn, but Jon didn't seem to have even heard. "He claims he's the one who circulated the video for—for Arya," Jon said, slowly, as though every word was a great effort. "I can't say I'm surprised. There are only a handful of people in the country who could have bypassed the protocols—ours and the Gold Cloaks'—so easily."

Sam, Pyp, and Grenn all shifted uneasily as Jon spoke. None of them mentioned Ygritte's name, but Grenn knew they were all thinking it. Ygritte was the best tech engineer in Westeros, maybe even in the world, and was one hell of an information broker on top of it, with half a hundred informants and a full bank of comm agents begging her for data under the table in any given month. She could have done it, and done it better than the buggering Bull could have even imagined. Gods knew she'd be a lifesaver here right now, with her almost unnatural affinity for the tech and the energy that moved through it, but they'd lost contact with her a week before the attacks started, after she'd gone north in search of some ley nodule she swore would give her access to some information line or another. Grenn knew better than anyone what it looked like north of the Wall right now, and it surely didn't look good. Not for them and certainly not for her.

After a moment, Jon continued slowly, paraphrasing the contents of the message as he went. "He hopes we will forgive him the extra work it's caused—" Grenn snorted derisively. "—because it's part of a larger movement to restore justice and prosperity to the people and ease our burden here... 'by way of information,' he says." Jon frowned at the datapad for a moment. "He asks a favor, on good faith, but there's nothing here to say what he wants. The signature stamp has Arya's mark on it, too, so she must still be there with him. I don't think he could have replicated that without her there."

The bastard _Bull_ and the gods-damned sister all at once. This day just got better and better. "Outlaws. We're getting messages from outlaws. Is this politics mess ever gonna end?" Grenn groaned.

Pyp reached to pinch Grenn's side in warning, but Grenn caught his wrist and held it fast.

"I'm beginning to think not," Jon said, still visibly subdued. Then: "The Riverlands. She's in the Riverlands. It's good to know the Winterfell rumors were false, though that opens up a whole other line of questions entirely. But that's for another day, when this battle has been won." He sighed, looking far too old and tired for a man of four and twenty, and handed the datapad back to Pyp, who brightened instantly at the chance to fiddle with another puzzle. "You said that's not all there is to it?"

"Is it ever? Course not. I'll do some digging and see what the cheeky bugger's encoded in this mess this time."

Jon nodded. "When you're able, but don't prioritize it over keeping everything online and functional here. I'm going to make a round of the inner perimeter and do some check ins."

Sam put a hand to Jon's forearm. "All right, Jon?"

"All right, Sam," Jon said, as convincingly as Jon ever did, and Sam let him go. But Jon paused when he reached the doorway and jerked his head at Sam in invitation. "Come with me this round," he offered. "I'm sure our resident Ranger tech engineer can handle the Wall for an hour or two."

"Damn right," Pyp said, shooing them out the door.

"That gods-damned sister," Grenn swore as the door swung closed behind the two, and Pyp only sighed at him.


	2. Chapter 2

Sometime late in the evening, when the storms had been blessedly quiet for a few hours and the sky to the west showed a hint of the setting sun through the mass of purple clouds on the horizon, Grenn found himself back to the control room. Toad had the outer Wall and Grenn trusted him wholly, but he was still on edge. If he couldn't be on the Wall or over it, he preferred to be down here beneath it, checking on the ones who ensured its inner strength would hold up as well. He wound his way through equipment and workspaces and the half-dozen or so brothers on watch for this shift, all studiously bent over their monitoring VDUs. Brightly blinking consoles cast multi-colored cascades of light across the dark walls, the monitoring programs beeped and hummed soft little songs, and Grenn stuffed his hands into the deep pockets of his undercoat and made his way to the back of the room. Pyp wasn't in his corner, but he wasn’t in his bunk either, so Grenn expected he'd be back soon.

Grenn could wait.

Jon's datapad holding the message from Gendry the bumbling Bull sat on the edge of Pyp's workspace, and Grenn picked it up idly. Grenn grumbled quietly to himself as he prodded the datapad to life and paged through the message that still sat mockingly on the display screen. "The great blubbering Bull. What a self-important little prick," he muttered with the most begrudging smidge of admiration imaginable. "What a snide little punk."

"We all know about your hulking man crush on the Bull, Grenn, no need to announce it to the world," Pyp snapped from somewhere behind him.

Grenn jumped and dropped the datapad into his pocket guiltily. He turned to grunt out a crabby comment in response, but Pyp just looked so _tired_. Grenn frowned. "When's the last time you slept?"

If Pyp was surprised at the concern in Grenn's tone, he didn't show it. He perched himself on the edge of his chair and scrubbed at his face with his hands. "'m fine," he said. "I'll sleep soon, I promise. Just wanted to do another check in, because it's been too quiet the past few hours for my taste." He shook out his lithe limbs and settled in his seat, turning away from Grenn to tap at his console and scan through first the visual reports from the surface of the Wall and then those from the network center. The multi-colored lights from the consoles cast his skin in shades of green and blue, finding the worried furrows in his brow and settling there in shadow.

"It's all a little strange, isn't it?" Grenn asked him quietly, moving to lean his bulk against the hard line of the bolted desk that formed Pyp's workspace. "First all the increased ground activity north of the Wall, then losing contact with Ygritte, and now this great teeming mess with Jon's sister and the Bull...."

The console lights reflected softly in Pyp's eyes as he looked up from his maps, and his mouth twisted wryly. "It's more than a little strange. Sam and Jon and most of the crew in here have been talking about it for a couple days but can't make it fit together. Your lot's puzzling over it too, I'd wager. And especially now that we know the Bull and the Brotherhood's involved; it's a big mess of questions. No new information from the ranging front this afternoon?"

Grenn shook his head, then let his chin fall to his chest and heaved a sigh.

He stood in silence and read over the Bull's message again as Pyp paged through digital images and maps and reports all telling the same story, the one they already knew all too well.

Pyp rubbed a hand across his face again, the movement catching Grenn's eye. "See here," Pyp said, as much to himself as to Grenn, "The five points on the Wall where they keep hitting. It's not all at once, there's a pattern to it: _here_ , then there, there, there, _there_ ," he said swiftly, fingers tapping at each point on the display in time with the words. "Hard, less, less, less, then hard again." He repeated the tapping twice again, his brow furrowed in frustrated concentration.

Grenn mirrored the motion almost unconsciously and then asked the question that had been bothering him all day. "Why did he send the message?"

"Who?"

"The Bull. Why'd he send the message to Jon?"

Pyp shrugged. "She's his sister, isn't she? More to it, they stirred up a right mess of shit, and it has a direct effect on us."

"We're loyal to the crown," Grenn said, but Pyp shook his head.

"To the _realm,_ " Pyp corrected.

Grenn made an impatient noise. "Whoever wears the crown rules the realm. Don't matter how he got it, Joffrey was still the king and Cersei Lannister was still his mother. Why would outlaws tell us why and when they've been outlawing?"

"Is that a word?" Pyp asked cheekily. Grenn rolled his eyes.

"You know he's been in contact before," Pyp continued, "and not just with Jon. He and Ygritte did some work together more than once—almost all the freelance tech engineers work together one point or another. Southron laws don't mean the same thing up here, you know that."

Grenn prodded at the suddenly-darkened datapad in an attempt to bring up the Bull's message again, but it remained dark. This didn't sit right with him; none of this gods-damned mess sat right with him. "Something's not right," he insisted stubbornly.

Pyp glanced up at the quick shuffling footsteps coming from the entrance and waved a hand as Sam approached.

"Any news, Slayer?" Pyp asked, deflecting.

Sam's look soured briefly at the nickname, but he handed Pyp a slip of parchment paper covered in scratch symbols and equations that made Grenn's head hurt just to think about.

"Oy, is this in charcoal?" Pyp asked, incredulous.

Sam waved him off. "We went up top for a check-in," he said, and Grenn's head shot up sharply. Sam raised his hands defensively. "We were careful! Jam your hype, ranger! Jon did a standard walk-around. All I did was some triangulation with the surveying reflectors—"

"The old infrared?" Pyp asked, curious.

Sam nodded. "Yeah. And I came up with some new numbers to run. You want to give it a go?"

"Hell yeah," Pyp said, studying the parchment closely. "These look to run counter to the pattern we talked about. Oh, mayhaps we can run them on a tangent alongside…."

Grenn tuned the two men out for a time as they enthused loudly in technical terms he refused to understand, and just watched as Pyp wiggled in excitement in his seat and his hands flew over the console, running calculations and inputting Sam's data. After a moment, Grenn looked away and shook the datapad vigorously until the display finally lit up again.

He prodded at the screen insistently, but the message wouldn't move and the display remained stuck on a single static screen. He scrabbled his fingertips over the smooth surface of the display several times in vain. "The damned thing isn't working right," he grumbled finally, annoyed. "You sure you finished the refurb on this one, Pyp?" He tapped at the screen, _hard soft soft soft hard._

"Five points. Same as..." Pyp was saying, but he looked up at Grenn's voice. "Oy, you great oaf, be gentle with it. Two fingers, not all five! Mind your ham hands! What are you even—" Pyp made a disgusted, despairing sound and moved to yank the datapad from Grenn's grip just as the stuck message dimmed and a red stamped screen slid into its place, the familiar flicker of fire sigil flashing across the surface briefly before fading back to solid red. Pyp and Grenn both froze, staring at it.

"Do that again," Sam said with breathless force.

Grenn set all five of his fingers to the display and tapped them one at a time in Pyp's pattern. The screen seemed to shake, the bright red pixilating itself ever so slightly before solidifying again.

"That clever ox," Pyp breathed, then seemed to shake himself. "What am I even saying. _You_ clever ox! You fuzzy stupid face!"

"That doesn't even make sense—" Grenn started, but cut off when Pyp flailed his limbs in his haste to stand. Sam snatched the datapad from Grenn's hands while he was distracted and tried the pattern himself, much quicker than Grenn's thick fingers could manage.

"Pyp, this is it," Sam said. "He's found it. The key is in here, I'm sure of it."

"Key?" Grenn said. Pyp threw back his head and laughed long and loud before turning to him with a predatory grin. Grenn felt distinctly _hunted_ all of a sudden, and perhaps rightly so.

Grenn stumbled back a foot or two as Pyp scrambled up to him. "You great lumbering aurochs! I could kiss you," Pyp crowed, and then he did. Pyp's hands smacked Grenn's cheeks none-too-gently, the thin leather covering his palms stinging slightly even through Grenn's beard, and he yanked Grenn's face down to meet his own in a brief, hard press of cold lips. He pulled away with an exaggerated _smack_ before Grenn quite understood what had happened and tripped his way back into his seat with a slightly manic chuckle. "You're the smartest fool I've ever heard of," he said, not bothering to look back at Grenn, and his fingers already flying over the console.

"I'm not," Grenn said, the protest weak even to his own ears. Sam smiled at him, amused and knowing, and Grenn shoved his shoulder hard.

"Sam!" Pyp demanded. "Come give a hand. This is going to be brilliant! And you!" He did turn back now, pointing a finger at Grenn. "Go find Jon! I promise you he will want to see this." Grenn lingered just long enough to see that the color burning high on Pyp's cheeks had pinkened the tips of his ears as well before hurrying away to do as he asked.


	3. Chapter 3

Jon stood and listened patiently even though the way they talked over each other was insufferable. This was why Grenn never listened to them.

"It's not an attack at all," Pyp said.

"Well, it is, but it's not _just_ an attack," Sam said.

"But it's been altered and it's pulsing with this extra data!"

"It's part feign—"

"And part distraction!"

"No, Pyp, that's the same thing! Jon, it's got an extra layer of information encoded overtop the rest of it and that's altered the flow to this precise pattern—"

"I can't believe we didn't see it! Even Grenn was able to see it and he can't see anything past the bird's nest on his face!"

"It was hidden quite cleverly. If you look right here you can see how the pathways overlap and shift—"

"It's the five-pointed flame, her sigil."

"And the five-pointed leaf, for the Free Union."

"And then, _bam_! There it is!"

"There what is?" thundered Jon at last. "What in the name of the Gods are you two trying to say?"

"It's got a message," Pyp said meekly, and Sam shrugged in assent. "From Ygritte."

"The Bull wove one of her codes into message he sent and when we unlocked it, it fit perfectly in with the figures we already had and completed the code sequence," Sam added. "When you compile the lot together, it works out to be a channel with her signature on it."

Jon was shaking his head, expression not quite hopeful. "But how would he—"

"We expect she's got some connection laid down between his comms and hers," Sam explained. "Something to let him know when she needs assistance."

"Well, are you going to open it or just run your damned mouths for another hour?" Grenn finally put in crossly.

Pyp twisted his face in an expression that would have been comical at any other time, but Grenn wasn't having any of it.

"Of course, of course, if Jon…?" Sam began.

"Do it," Jon said with what Pyp liked to call the Lord Commander steel in his voice.

It took only a few moments, but the time seemed to stretch on for ages before the console's VDU flashed brightly and flipped up to holographic display mode. Grenn hopped back, startled at the sudden appearance of the projection.

"Oy! Took you useless mooks long enough! The Bull got my signal through to you, I s'pose?"

Jon's breath left him in a hiss between his teeth. "Ygritte," he said, his shoulders sagging like the strings of tension around him had been cut. "He did," Jon affirmed.

"Jon Snow," she said with a tired grin, her teeth flashing white in her dirty and dimly-lit face. "You caught us at a rough time. I've found the nodule and, ah, some other things of mighty interest up here in these systems. But since you were able to call me up I guess you already know—it's everything I hoped it would be. It's let me tap into the Walker's lines and manipulate them a bit."

"It is the Others, then? This is the Night King's push?" Jon asked. That was nothing they didn't already suspect, but best to make sure, Grenn supposed.

"Oh, aye, but it's..." she hesitated, and then plowed on. "It's a mite more complicated than all that."

"Complicated?" Jon didn't sound pleased.

"I'll come and give you a full report when we cross the Wall again. Give me a week or two and I'll know enough to break it down for your precious ears."

Grenn and Pyp exchanged a glance. Despite Ygritte's light words, this was plainly serious. Jon's alliance with the Free Folk, tenuous as it was and not, perhaps, entirely within the confines of the Crown's blessing, had still kept the two factions working largely in consort or at least to the same ends, but rarely would one of the Free Folk come into a Watch stronghold proper, even Ygritte. Jon knew this better than any of them, of course, and his look was worried, tightness gathering around his mouth and eyes.

But Ygritte continued. "Any rate, I piggybacked on their lines just as the first signal went up and set the weir pattern to strike the Wall in fives rather than the threes that would have punched right through. You're welcome, by the way."

Jon's expression shifted, an unmistakable spark of pride and affection softening his eyes. "Thank you," he said genuinely.

She snorted but didn't hold back another grin. "I'll be happier about that Wall still standing once I'm back on the other side o' it. They're going mental up there, though. I wish I could see them pissing all over themselves trying to figure out what's happened."

A faint movement was visible behind her transparent form and she glanced back, frowning. "We've got more work to finish up here, and I'll need to reroute their signals more than once before I head back, but there'll be plenty to know by then."

"What, that's it?" Pyp asked, teasing, before Jon could respond. "Haven't you got anything useful to tell us?"

"Already sent through a bundle of intel as soon as you opened the connection and I saw your ugly faces," Ygritte said breezily. "Just one more thing and I have to get back to this. Jon Snow—"

Ygritte paused and the upper outline of her form shifted in a flurry of light, movement too swift for the hologram to follow clearly. When it settled and she solidified again, there was a dark shape on her shoulder. " _Snow_ ," the raven quorked. "Jon Snow!"

"Ygritte..." Jon breathed, his expression caught up somewhere between disbelief and something Grenn couldn't quite identify. Grenn wasn't quite sure he understood what was happening.

Ygritte laughed and lifted a careful hand to smooth down the bird's feathers. "Oh, now you see where we are, do you? Don't look like that, you big baby. I'm an information broker, Jon Snow. Where d'you think the information comes from?" She tapped her temple with one finger and a wide grin and the hologram blinked out.

The console lit up almost instantly with an influx of closely-directed encoded data, bundled just as Ygritte's reports often were. Sam drew them apart carefully and Jon, Pyp, and Grenn all huddled around him, watching the strings of numbers gliding gracefully through the stream as he directed them. After a moment, Sam reached one that made him pause and lower his hand.

"Jon," Sam said softly, almost trepidatiously. He nudged the display with a fleshy knuckle. "Look at these signatures."

Jon looked, and then he went very still, his face showing nothing. "That isn't possible," he said. "Sam. How is that possible?"

Sam bit his lip and looked down, guilt etched across every inch of his face.

"Sam," Jon said again, his voice cracking. "What do you know?"

"Only that he's alive," Sam said miserably. "I swore I wouldn't tell you, I swore I—but if Ygritte found him then it could be they're—this is good news, Jon! He's alive and he's helping us somehow—"

"But how?" Jon asked. He waved Sam's words away, not seeming to want an answer. Jon pushed Sam gently to the side, taking over the console and drawing up the identifier string again. He stared at it for a long moment. "Bran?" he whispered, disbelief weighing down his voice.

 _Oh no_ , Grenn thought with an inward groan. First the little sister had to go and destroy the political structure in King's Landing and now the little brother was—what?—cavorting around north of the Wall and getting himself neck deep in the unthinkably dangerous game Ygritte was playing with the Night's King? Were all the Stark children busy plotting to make everyone's lives more complicated and give his poor Lord Commander a heart attack? There was another little brother, wasn't there? Or was it just another little sister? Grenn didn't remember, but he hoped he or she would be less troublesome than this lot if they ever did reappear.

But he chastised himself a little when Jon passed a hand over his face and pulled it away damp. Sam shuffled his feet and then patted Jon's shoulder awkwardly, and Jon made a choking noise that was almost a laugh. "We'll have words later," Jon promised him, ominous through his relieved laughter. "But he's alive, Sam? Truly, he's alive?"

Pyp's hand locked around Grenn's forearm, and he drew him away quietly. "Come on," Pyp said softly. "We'll sort it out soon enough. Let him be for now."

* * *

  


Grenn was on his second flagon of wine, and Pyp's cheeks were so pink in the firelight of Grenn's little room that he could barely stand it.

Pyp was shaking his head, seemingly amazed, and was on his second retelling of the evening's revelations, as though Grenn hadn't been there for the lot of it. "Only someone as stupid as you would have ever done that. Abusing my tech like that! And it _worked!_ Whoever would have thought that was possible?" He dropped his head back against the stone wall where he was leaning and laughed, exposing the pale underside of his neck below the dark dusting of stubble on his chin.

Grenn was on his feet before he realized he'd moved. Pyp's sharp eyes caught the movement and his gaze settled on Grenn like some heavy thing chained to his very bones.

"But it _was_ possible," Grenn said gruffly, shuffling closer and bracing his hands on the wall to either side of Pyp's head, bracketing him in, their faces so close it made his heart hammer. "So maybe you should have thought of it. Maybe you just don't have enough imagination."

"Oh, I can imagine quite a bit," Pyp said, wrapping his clever fingers firmly around Grenn's collar.

Possessed by the wine or the frustration of the kiss in the control room or the impish look on Pyp's face, Grenn bent and hooked his hands around Pyp's thighs and lifted him, easy as you please, until Pyp was slightly higher than eye level and his back was pinned to the rough stone of the wall and his legs were hooked easily around Grenn's waist, tightening and holding him close. Grenn dropped his head and buried his face in the crook of Pyp's neck for a moment, catching his breath and settling slowly into the ease of _knowing_. He had wanted for so long, but he hadn't _known_. Maybe Pyp was right; he was stupid. Stupid not to have seen it long ago.

Pyp's hands curled into the hair at Grenn's nape and he inhaled, his whole body shuddering with the force of it, and Grenn _knew_.

"Take— _oh_ —take this, for instance. I imagined _this_ scenario more than once," Pyp laughed breathlessly. "The firelight, the wine, you shoving me against a wall and putting your—"

Grenn shut him up with his own lips, dragging him down into a kiss. It was a real kiss—not like that infuriating peck they'd done earlier—this one roughened by Grenn's beard and years of silent wishing, by Pyp's red-bitten lips and vigorous impatience. Grenn pressed his body hard against Pyp, and Pyp pushed back, fingers twisting in Grenn's hair and tugging him even closer until their teeth bumped and Grenn giggled helplessly into his mouth. That earned him a sharp nip to the edge of his bottom lip and a long, slow kiss in return, Pyp's tongue tracing over his in a hot line, warmed by the fire and wine.

"Gods above," Pyp groaned against him. "I thought you weren't going to do that for another seven years. I might have had to take matters into my own hands."

"Be quiet," Grenn told him.

"By 'matters' I mean 'your cock,'" Pyp said blithely.

"Shut up," Grenn groaned.

"Not in a hundred years."

"We have to report in with Jon at daybreak," Grenn said. "Sam sent out a message, remember?"

"That's almost an hour from now," Pyp told him. "Come back here."

  
  


* * *

  


They made it to the control room twenty minutes past daybreak, and when Jon's sharp eyes looked him up and down he doubtless saw that Pyp's neck was red for a reason other than his tell-tale blush. But Jon didn't say a word to them in reprimand, and Grenn wouldn't have cared if he did. He decided, rather charitably, that if they lived through the week he might even forgive Jon's little sister for this whole mess.

 

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is essentially how the story ended in its original state. I promised Daria I'd make an addition, though, and an addition is forthcoming... along with a change in rating.

**Author's Note:**

> Come cry about fictional characters with me on [tumblr](http://sergendry.tumblr.com).


End file.
